Girl Talk

Sample-crazed producer Gregg Gillis talks about his forthcoming collaborative EP with excitable hip-hop vet Freeway, Broken Ankles, and why he thinks the internet isn't quite as bad for new artists as David Byrne would have you believe.

If you've completely lost your shit to one of Girl Talk’s overwhelming sample-collage albums only to subsequently shelve it for the rarest of occasions, don’t feel so bad. Turns out the guy who made them has pretty much done the same exact thing. Referring to his party-crashing trilogy of Night Ripper,Feed the Animals, and All Day, Gregg Gillis admits: “I don't really just throw them on myself, but I do reference them a lot. Sometimes I have a hard time remembering exactly the way something went on an album, so I find myself going on YouTube. It's kind of embarrassing.”

And yet, for all the concerns about how the Girl Talk project would (or would not) hold up with age, 2014 is looking a lot like the kind of world Gillis envisioned back in 2006 on Night Ripper. Obviously, there were people who found space for both Neutral Milk Hotel and Ying Yang Twins then, but they were rarely, if ever, part of the same conversation. Nowadays, any indie band that doesn’t incorporate elements of pop, hip-hop, or R&B into their sound tends to be seen as hopelessly puritanical.

Meanwhile, most artists now rely on record sales about as much as Gillis does, which is to say, not at all. In fact, though no one has ever paid a dime for a Girl Talk record, a recent study showed that 2010’s All Day actually helped other artists make money. Moreover, many DJ/producers can not only play rock festivals at this point, they can often headline them for a highly lucrative fee. That fact isn’t lost on Gillis, especially after a startling New Yorker piece from last year revealed how much bigtime club gigs in Las Vegas actually pay. "I'm in a weird point because I feel like I'm in that conversation at times, but otherwise I feel so different from that," says Gillis. "I do play Vegas and get offers where the money is good, but I don't know if it's best for the way I want to present this.”

To some extent, Gillis has taken the opportunity to kick up his heels a bit. He toured far less in 2013 than in years past and spent a lot of time hanging with his “friends with real jobs” in his hometown of Pittsburgh, where they may hit a TGI Friday's in the suburbs or see a Steelers-jersey-filled house show for "some weirdo band." His day-to-day consists of waking up “in the afternoon, checking WorldStar and email, and then just working on tunes.”

Some of those tracks will make up his upcoming collaborative EP with Philadelphia firebrand Freeway, Broken Ankles, due out April 8 via mixtape hub DatPiff. (The release, which Gillis considers “the next Girl Talk album,” also features guest shots from Waka Flocka Flame, Young Chris, and Jadakiss.) He regards his Keystone State counterpart as a “legend,” and goes on to discuss how Jim Jones changed his life, Pittsburgh’s current status a hip-hop hotbed, and his goals in uniting his aesthetic with an underground, not-quite-star like Freeway: “I'm sure a ton of Freeway fans have no idea who Girl Talk is and a ton of Girl Talk fans have no idea who Freeway is—my goal is to bridge that gap."

Watch the teaser for Girl Talk and Freeway's video with Waka Flock Flame:

Pitchfork: Did you reach out to Freeway for this project or vice versa?

Gregg Gillis: I made the first move. I had 70 beats ready to go. A lot of them were like a modern take on soul beats, which I've always loved, and those sounds are classic Freeway. He has this whole history of starting with Jay-Z and Roc-A-Fella and moving to Rhymesayers, but at no point has he stopped doing his thing. He's been extremely consistent, but still has evolved on his own path, which is something I admire in any musician. I always like the people who keep moving forward, but kind of stay in their own lane.

Pitchfork: How did you and Freeway get along initially?

GG: It started off a little stiff. I knew he had seen YouTube videos of me performing and he knew the general gist of it. Then finally we were on Rock the Bells together, and when he saw the show, I think it finally clicked. It took a little while for us to gel. This was not a “he goes to the studio and raps over my song” sort of thing. This was two months of putting a ton of stuff together. I hope you hear it in the release.

Watch Girl Talk and Freeway perform "Tolerated" at a Brooklyn show last year:

Pitchfork: Were there any moments where you caught yourself playing up your hip-hop knowledge to impress Freeway?

GG: It’s easy to forget, after spending a lot of time with him in the studio and just listening to him talk, that he’s a legend. I’m kind of geeking out, like, “Whoa, I’m in the studio with Freeway.” I’ve never written a lyric in my life, and he writes in his head. It’s all right there on the spot, and it’s always good. But there were a few times where I felt like the delivery could be changed, or maybe a syllable could be different, and I felt like a complete insane asshole on the first day, trying to say something to Freeway. But by the end it got comfortable. I would talk to my high school friends and be like, “I just suggested how to do an ad-lib to Freeway.”

Pitchfork: Was there any point where he said, “I can’t really rap over this”?

GG: Something that distinguishes my solo work from normal rap production is that it has a lot of melody—it’s not just cutting up a song and having someone rap over it. And there’s a lot going on on some of the beats. If we wanted to try something, he’d more or less be down. We had him over some straight rock beats, and that was his call.

Pitchfork: Have you ever previously tried to make hip-hop beats?

GG: I did one beat, like, 10 years ago, for a group in Pittsburgh. The only other thing other than that was the Jim Jones [track "Believe in Magic" for Pitchfork.tv's "Selector"]. That was influential. It was a wild night. It turned into us being in the studio for five or six hours, and the ad-lib part was absolutely triumphant. He got in the booth and was running around and I'm pretty sure he was drinking something and smoking something else. I have no idea what was even in the rotation at that point in the night, but he was absolutely losing it. The ad-libs just come to him. The crew in the studio that night was wowed.

Pitchfork: When Night Ripper dropped, some people still held assumptions about pop and hip-hop and indie rock having completely separate fan bases. But now, it’s fairly obvious that everything is fair game. Do you find that more intimidating as an artist, or freeing in a way?

GG: It’s a positive thing. Though it does make things a little more complicated in terms of the purpose of doing this. Prior to Night Ripper, when I would play pop music at underground shows, it was offensive to some people. I wasn’t doing it to piss people off: I just didn’t believe in those strong divisions that you’re supposed to listen to this or that. But as that idea gets more accessible, it’s not as offensive to people; the electronic music underground is just as big as the mainstream. In Pittsburgh, they don’t necessarily play Tiesto on the radio, but that music is the biggest music in the world right now. It has been bizarre with the whole EDM explosion and how that fits into what I’m doing, but for me it's always been the musical idea first before any conceptual thing. So even as EDM happens, I always like to borrow bits and pieces of things. There’s a line between jumping on something that’s happening and incorporating bits and pieces of it into my work.

Pitchfork: You were the only Pittsburgh artist to break on a national level since maybe Rusted Root, so how does it feel now that Wiz Khalifa and Mac Miller have put a much bigger spotlight on your city?

GG: It's been cool because I've been supporting those guys for a while, and I remember when Wiz Khalifa first came on the radio here, around 2005. I went to a show of his and I had a burnt copy of Night Ripper before it came out—I met him there and gave him that copy. I played a few shows with him before things really took off. They've got Rostrum Records, which is a Pittsburgh-based label, and they all went to the same high school, Taylor Allderdice. I feel like the perception of Pittsburgh has definitely changed nationally based on Wiz and Mac Miller. Those guys are both not in any way manufactured by the majors or anything like that. They were doing local shows at the Shadow Lounge.

GG: I’d be curious about the amount of independent bands that lived off of music in 1998 versus 2013. A lot of my friends who came up in a DIY way live on music now, and I don’t think they would’ve had an avenue to have that fan base prior to the internet. There are now bands that get no mainstream exposure and still play at arenas in Tennessee. The industry side of things has been exposed. In the 90s, it was so hard to understand everything that was going on. You just had a vague understanding of where a band fit in, and who was popular. Now, people have a good understanding of that, and they’re giving new bands a shot.

Obviously for my project in particular, people think, “Oh yeah, that guy cuts up pop music and it’s popular—end of story.” Like it’s that easy. But for me, this came from a place of being influenced by Negativland and John Oswald and Kid606. I can honestly say I did this for six years and I wasn’t trying to make a following. I was just trying to make interesting music. That’s not being modest, that’s just being realistic. Prior to Night Ripper, no one gambled on this. I burned maybe 300 CDs and sent them out to labels and DJs and everything, and I heard back from one person. Then it turned into this thing that took off. I’m not the only one; there’s a lot of examples of that, which is really exciting.

Pitchfork: Do you still worry about lawsuits?

GG: Yeah, but I don't lose sleep over it. And I do believe in what I'm doing, so “worry” isn't an accurate term. I'm confident in what I'm doing and believe it should be legal if it's transformative and comes in its own entity and doesn't negatively impact the sales of the source materials. It's always a possibility, but I feel like I've always tried to not let that influence me. If you're going to do this, you've got to go full-on. There's no half-assing it.